![]() His schooling was interrupted when he was forced into the Wehrmacht. While the town was very Catholic, he did not remember his family being particularly pious-he once joked that of all the seminarians studying with him when he started in Bamberg, he was the only one who had not been an altar boy. It is as if one were born not 50 years ago, but somewhere along the receding edges of the Middle Ages.” As he once wrote: “One comes from far away when one comes from there. It was a small, Catholic town, not yet touched by the processes of secularization at work in the rest of Europe. Metz (Baptist to his friends) was born in Auerbach, in northeast Bavaria, on August 5, 1928. This young man was Johann Baptist Metz, and he went on to do just this, becoming in the process a trail-blazing theologian for an age in which memories like these have become far too common and, what is worse, met with ever greater indifference. Political theology was a prophetic protest against the privatization of Christian faith: the reduction of its scope to one’s relationship to God and one-on-one ethical behavior towards others. What would happen if one took this sort of thing not to the psychologist but into the church, and if one would not allow oneself to be talked out of such unreconciled memories even by theology, but rather wanted to have faith with them, and with them to speak about God?” This is how I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all of my childhood dreams crumble away…. “Now,” he remembered, “I could only see dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and laughter. ![]() When he returned, he found the other members of his unit, all as young as he, dead, wiped out in a sudden air and armored assault. In the last desperate weeks of World War II in Germany, a 16-year-old soldier was sent by his commanding officer to the rear with a message for headquarters.
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